| I had a dream about the circus and the sick mother and then, just sort of wandering through the door and very, very gradually walking into this abandoned city... -Dave McKean |
| I had an idea about a girl, and, sort of, two girls who are one girl -- a weird dichotomy. -Neil Gaiman |
Keep Feeling Fascination
The men behind MirrorMask
discuss the magic of their method
(and vice-versa)
-- and girls' behaviour.
BY GREGORY WEINKAUF
The door gently but firmly closes, and there within the glass-and-cinderblock room lounge five of us, including two
intriguing men in black as well as Kermit the Frog and The Bear (of the Big Blue House fame). The latter two observe in
glazed silence as director Dave McKean and writer Neil Gaiman warm up to discussing their fantastical new feature,
MirrorMask.
They are brought together beneath the roof of Kermit’s house, The Henson Company in Hollywood -- formerly A&M
Records, and, before that, the workshop of Charlie Chaplin, where he shot portions of The Gold Rush, among other
classics. Now in this esteemed location, one of the world’s top fiction writers and his collaborator, one of the world’s
top graphic designers (turned director), are keen to consider their first foray into feature filmmaking.
Thinking quickly and drawing courage from The Frog, Gregory of ÜberCiné decides to break the ice with a brilliant
question:
Gregory: Have you been in this room before?
Dave McKean: Yes, we keep being shuffled in and out of the rooms.
Neil Gaiman: We move from room to room to room.
D: This is the third time in this room.
N: The one upstairs sort of worked, because we had two of these interviews where you have a bunch of people –
G ("helpfully"): Oh, 'roundtables.'
N: -- and there was one upstairs…roundtables…which worked, just about, but there was one guy who never said
anything.
D: Yeah -- I made him say something.
N: No, I…
D: I said: ‘One more question -- you’re going to ask it.’
G: You extracted…
D (enjoying the memory): ‘You’re just sitting there! You haven’t said anything!’
N: Yeah, unfortunately I realized that we were out of time, so they came in and ended it, and he hadn’t said a word.
G (encouragingly): Right...
N: But then the one downstairs was really odd because it was obvious that the people were all completely different. If
they’re all sort of from the same general background it’s okay – except, you know, you have the two guys from the
comics press on the sofa over there, and the lady here, and the somebody who never said anything there, and the guy
from a website here -- and they all have completely different agendas.
G (wincing at memories of simultaneously-shouted junket questions about Kabbalah bracelets, equestrian safety and
losing post-natal fat): Yeah, it becomes very competitive.
D: In some circumstances.
N (pausing very gently): It wasn’t that sort of nice thing where they’re all asking each other’s questions and everybody’s
happy. It was the…one person’s asking about eggs and the other person’s asking about…Grimm’s fairy tales…
G (presuming the best): So you were playing the diplomat earlier today.
N (amused): I just answer the question that’s asked. What’s fun about this, as I was saying earlier, is the…Normally, by
this point, in a long day of interviews, you are starting to get exhausted, mostly because you had to say the same five
things, over and over again, and somewhere around eleven-thirty you got tired of picking new words and ways to say
them, so now you’re sitting there saying word-for-word the same things…
[Dave is looking suddenly very meditative.]
N (continuing boldly toward the topic of the day): What’s interesting about MirrorMask, today, is that with the exception
of one question -- which is basically, ‘How did the project begin?’ -- everybody wants to know completely different
things. So there’s none of that picking-the-best-wording-of-Answer-B-once-you-hone-it-down-with-an-answer, it’s
more sort of going off in completely different directions. It’s kind of fun. I’m certainly not as wiped as I normally am by
this point.
[Dave remains thoughtful and quiet and carefully observes the turning capstans of my tape-recorder, which I sincerely
hope really are turning…]
G (risking gushing embarrassment as he has numerous times before): Well, I think it’s definitely that sort of project. I
have to confess I’m a bit excited about it because I sincerely believe that you have both created a new genre with this
film. Were you conscious of that initially? I mean, did you have a meeting and say, ‘Let’s start a new genre of feature
film’?
D (proudly yet with substantial mirth): New genre.
N: No, I mean, what was lovely about this was that what we produced was essentially produced from the barriers. You
know, art is normally created trying to get around barriers, when you’re presented with a set of limitations. And the
limitations on this one were really fun and really difficult -- which were: Can we make a family fantasy film which would
have the same kind of effect on somebody watching it as [Henson family classics, both designed by Brian Froud]
Labyrinth or Dark Crystal did -- and can you do it for four million dollars? And with that as a sort of ground rule, we
wound up having to figure out the language of the film, in order to do it at that budget. Scripting it was really weird. We
had to write it together, because I couldn’t just do the thing that I would normally do -- go off and write a script and
then give it to Dave to make into a film or make into art of whatever, because only Dave actually understood what he
was planning to do digitally that would allow him to bring in this animated film for money that would not actually feed a
large Hollywood production.
[Dave continues to eye the hypnotic capstans, but nods in agreement.]
G: You had some experience together, given your short films, and even the opening titles for [BBC miniseries]
Neverwhere. Were those kind of a launching pad for the style you were creating together?
D (enthusiastically): Kind of! About…um…eight years ago? -- I kind of wanted to start playing with moving picture
things -- no real plan -- and then right about 1998 I really wanted to get to grips with film. I’ve always loved film. But I
thought: Nobody’s actually going to knock on my door and say, ‘Do you want to make a film? Here, have a cheque.’ So
I thought I should just get on with it and do it, so I made two short films {elegant festival faves "The Week Before" and
"N[eon]"}, and in making those films for no money at all…
N (cheerfully interjecting): In his mother’s barn.
D (chuckling): Yeah. In the barn, yeah.
G: Wait, please pause for a moment. Literally?
N: Yeah!
D: Yeah, literally.
G: That’s the best.
D: It’s ‘Let’s Put On A Show’ time. Judy Garland. And then I worked with a little team. Through an advertising job I
met a producer. Through him I met a DP, Tony Shearn, and through doing the Neverwhere parts and things like that, I
met a CG supervisor who trained as an artist but shifted into computers, called Max McMullin, and that was my little
team. We made all the short films together, the music videos, etc., with this plan that we’d be working towards making a
feature film. At that point we didn’t know what it would be. I started writing a few scripts, and then the obvious
opportunity came up.
N: What was also funny was that around the point where -- around 1996 was the point where…well, earlier, I mean,
more like 1994-95 -- Dave sort of confessed to me, much as somebody would confess to some kind of inappropriate
personal habit…
[Gregory furtively glances at The Frog, who vibrates slightly but somehow refrains from laughing out loud.]
N (continuing):…that he was actually really was quite serious about wanting to make some films. And I said, ‘Okay,
well, I’ll make it happen.’ And over the years we’d come up with a sort of very loose plan. I seemed to be the one who
was actually out doing Hollywood stuff -- which Dave had no desire of being out here, or playing the game of being out
here -- and I was actually starting to enjoy it a bit, to the point where by 2003 The Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page
story on how I was the author who had the most bought-but-unmade properties.
[Laughter all round.]
G: That’s pretty soon to change, true?
N: Yeah, but it’s already changing. Beowulf [directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Ray Winstone in the lead] starts
shooting in about two weeks, and I think Coraline [based on Gaiman’s young-person’s novella, illustrated, natch, by
McKean] is technically in production [with A Nightmare Before Christmas’ Henry Selick helming], but it’s rather hard to
draw a line with it because it’s stop-motion animation. It’s greenlighted and they’re making models. So there’s two
things.
[Gaiman’s Books of Magic graphic novels -- considered to be more than a little of the inspiration for the Harry Potter
phenomenon -- are also fast forming into a Major Motion Picture.]
G: Dave has gotten his feet wet as a director. Now what’s your next step after [A Short Film About] John Bolton?
[Note for the uninitiated: John Bolton is an illustrator par excellence, and in 2003 Gaiman made…well…a short film about
him.]
N: Well, yes, I got my feet wet with John Bolton. Mostly, the idea with Bolton was: Okay, if I’m going to direct a film --
which I really wanted to do, having had stuff of mine directed by other people -- not Dave, I should say -- the
collaboration with Dave was very different. But the Neverwhere TV series, my Babylon 5 episode, which was directed
by a nice man [Doug Lefler; Dragonheart: A New Beginning] who did it very well. But those people left me -- and the
collaborations I’ve had with other directors as a writer -- have definitely left me going, ‘You know…at least I wouldn’t
screw it up like that.’
G: That’s generous.
N: There are things where you sort of go, ‘I may not be a great artist…’ but Clive Barker -- bless him, I love him -- was
the first person to say to me, he said, ‘You’ll direct.’ And I said, ‘I’m not a director; I have no desire to direct,’ and he
said, ‘Oh, you’ll direct in self-defense.’ And that actually was the point: There are things that I want to do where it will
be a matter of directing in self-defense, because I know how it is in my head. And then with Bolton, I thought, I’d better
find out if I actually enjoy the process, because if I don’t, it’s going to be a year out of my life, and it’s going to be a
really miserable year that I could have spent writing a book or making a comic or writing poetry or playing in the garden
or doing something with the kids. I could have enjoyed myself.
[Gregory references Gaiman’s “demon-tomato” salsa, an anecdote from the author’s web-journal, however even he
cannot now figure out exactly what he muttered to launch this topic.]
N (declamatorily, but with undeniable charm): I made salsa yesterday.
[Dave giggles.]
G: I did my research.
D: There’s a question we haven’t had so far.
G: You may answer it as well.
D: No, no, I haven’t tasted it yet.
N: I promised him a bottle. I made…I’m not sure…at least a tubful. I went out, I picked a bushel of tomatoes, I picked
the peppers, I did the onions, I came back and did the salsa. My hand was still burning this morning. And it should all be
bottled by the time I get home.
G: [mild grunting noise]
N: But, so with Bolton, that really was the idea: Just find out if I enjoy the process. And I actually discovered that
although some of the directing process just seems to be, somebody coming up to you and desperately going, ‘Does this
need to be blue or green?’ when the actual answer is: It doesn’t matter, what would you want? But you’d better say
either ‘blue’ or ‘green’ because otherwise they will think that you have no idea what’s going on.
G (to both): Well, there’s certainly, obviously a great deal of trust in your collaborations.
N (either deeply contemplating this, or humouring The Interviewer, or perhaps both): There is, really.
G: It’s legendary.
D: Is it? [chuckles heartily]
N: It is the nice thing about -- there was that point when we were having our photo taken [The Interviewer, incidentally,
was in the room and was mistaken by the photographer to be Gaiman, which rather made The Interviewer’s otherwise
mad day, in a jolly little way], and the realization that while we’ve been saying, casually, ‘Oh, we’ve been working
together for twenty years,’ actually, when you do the sums, we’ve been working together for twenty years -- which is a
long time. Seriously. And we still enjoy working together.
D: [growl of approval]
G (slyly slipping back to the project at hand): I understand that MirrorMask came about as a result of a story-pitch-
concept [sic] you had going on in the Henson household in England, and then developed into this script…
N: Actually, both of those things happened in the same time period. The simplicity of it was that Lisa Henson [producer;
Jim’s daughter] called us -- called me -- and said, ‘We’re making a family fantasy film, we have four million dollars. Do
you think that Dave McKean…She said, ‘I’ve seen Dave’s short films, I know that they were made with no money,
would he be interested in doing this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I can ask him.’
[The Interviewer realizes that he may have coaxed his subjects into the exact redundant loop that they all joked about not
getting into, back at the top of the conversation -- perhaps even the same genesis narrative found in the introduction to
the MirrorMask illustrated screenplay book he has perused at your finer booksellers about town -- but Gaiman’s on a
roll, and even The Frog and The Bear remain rapt, so we go with the flow.]
N (valiantly soldiering through): She said, ‘If he [McKean] is [interested], we know how much you cost as a scriptwriter
-- we cannot afford you -- but would you maybe come up with the story or something?’ And I said, ‘No, if Dave says
yes, I’m going to be writing this, and you can leave me to deal with my agent and my lawyer.’ And Dave said yes, so I
said yes. And then we sort of bounced a few ideas backwards and forwards, and they were…I had an idea about a girl,
and, sort of, two girls who are one girl, a weird dichotomy. A girl with a traveling theatre group, and Dave had an idea --
had a dream about –
G: [casually interrupts with something incomprehensible, now sounding quite weirdly like, ‘Two knights were Bob-Bob’
-- to be repaired forthwith if ever I discover what the hell I actually said, and why.]
D (amazingly getting this): Yes! I had a dream about the circus and the sick mother and then, just sort of wandering
through the door and very, very gradually walking into this abandoned city -- because I love European cities and just
wandering around places, you know, Venice at three in the morning, things like that. And I love that feeling.
G: This is a bit of a tangent, but in creating a female protagonist, you two are probably among the top men-artists [“men-
artists”?] who consistently create female protagonists that completely engross many, many people. Is this… [to Gaiman]
like, some of your books, Richard Mayhew [Neverwhere] and Shadow [American Gods], they are about heroic men. But
a lot of the time, you do focus on girls and young-woman protagonists. What’s the challenge involved in that?
N: Well, the bit that always fascinates me, honestly, is not -- I figure, you know, women are slightly more than fifty
percent of the human race; it makes sense to write women fifty percent of the time. On the other hand, it puzzles me that
people either cannot write women, do not write women, or, when they do write women, as happens a lot in comics, you
sort of read these characters and go: This is bizarre. You’ve lived on Planet Earth all these years. You must have had a
mother. Can you have gone through your entire life and never have encountered a woman? You write about them as if
they’re these fictional creatures. You know, and they can either be ‘men’ with enormous watermelons strapped to their
chests, or, or…
G: Was that a consideration early on with MirrorMask?
[Neil is busy, but Dave laughs at the absurdity.]
G (clarifying that this was an attempt at levity): No, no…
N (recovering really nicely from the pointless interruption): I think it was a consi…yeah, it was a consider…no, but, I
mean, the-the-the-the the decision to write women went all the way back, I think, to us talking about what we wanted to
do with Black Orchid…[the duo’s impressive, pre-Sandman, three-volume graphic novel outing of which I have three
first printings which were in my bag in that glass and cinderblock room with us but which I decided not to bother them
about signing, owing to the professional nature of our meeting and all].
G (interrupting again, basically throwing bad verbiage after bad): Yeah, that’s what I was actually leaning toward as well.
N: [...what we wanted to do with Black Orchid]…was, was the part, okay, let’s put in: Nobody’s writing female
characters who aren’t highly-trained Ninja assassins or really good with guns, and seeing we know lots of women but
none of them are highly-trained Ninja assassins…
[Dave laughs heartily. What is he not telling us?]
N: Why don’t we write about, just, all of them?’ It was more, sort of, ‘What aren’t people doing? Oh, we can do this,
and this will be fun!’ The joy, for me, of MirrorMask, was the fact that Helena -- the point that I think we knew that we
were doing something right with Helena, was the first time we got feedback on the script from Sony -- and they
grumbled. They’d read the script, and they weren’t quite sure from the script whether or not she was meant to be eleven
years old or eighteen years old, because sometimes she reacted like a kid, and sometimes she reacted as a young woman.
And, it was like, ‘Yes -- you must never have had a daughter.’ That for me is the joy of that age. I mean, how old is…
D: My daughter’s twelve, so she’s just sort of getting close to that now.
N: You must be seeing that at twelve, because I’m seeing that with my daughter -- this sort of weird one-day-she’s-
twenty-two, the-next-day-she’s-six.
D: Yes, definitely. I think also, to be fair, a lot of the character [of Helena] is Stephanie [Leonidas, superb lead actress of
MirrorMask]. You know, when she started actually engrossing herself in the character -- she was nineteen when she did
it, playing younger. A lot of the character became hers as well. And things like, there’s an early scene on the roof, where
she’s told how sick her mother is really and Rob Brydon [who plays her gentle father] is up there on the roof. And we
went through rehearsal and we had a read-through and it seemed to be fine, it seemed to be all good, but when she
actually came to do it, she absolutely broke down into tears and everything. I didn’t expect that at all -- we didn’t know
that was going to happen. And there were hardened gaffers and electricians all sort of wiping their eyes, which was
wonderful. So I think that the feeling that you have for her, and the fact that her anxieties you really connect with -- and
the fact that she believes it all, so you believe everything through her -- to be honest, that’s really down to Stephanie
carrying it off.
N: We were convinced she would be the hardest part to cast. We were actually convinced that Helena was going to be
the part that was going to be the absolute nightmare to cast. And actually, we got her on the first day, thought that it
couldn’t be that easy…and it turned out Valentine [Jason Barry in a fun, energetic turn as Helena’s friend and guide
through her quest] turned out to be the part that was impossible to cast -- which we assumed would be one of the nice,
easy ones.
[The door opens again as Another Figure stealthily enters the room -- neither Man nor Bear nor Frog. She is the kindly
bearer of the Wind-It-Up Gesture. The Interviewer requests One More, and has it granted.]
G: In most of your work together, and separately, there’s a great sort of archetypal storytelling mingled with common,
everyday reality. Where did you pitch MirrorMask, to decide, ‘All right, this is how we’re going to get the audience
involved, and then present them with things that some people may say, Oh, that’s too weird, I don’t even know what
that is -- what was that thing floating around the staircase?’
[Dave laughs knowingly, as only Dave can.]
N: In my experience, one of the lovely ways of, just, storytelling -- which I think we tried to do in MirrorMask, and I try
to do in a lot of things -- is where you more or less do the equivalent of taking somebody by the hand, put your other
hand on their shoulder, gaze deeply into their eyes, and say, ‘Walk with me, I’m going to tell you a story, and
everything’s going to be safe,’ and you walk with them into the forest and you walk with them a step at a time, and by
the time that they realize that you’ve abandoned them there and they’re lost in the forest, it’s too late -- they’re lost. I
think writing like that, that was part of the fun of MirrorMask. You meet Helena and you like her, and she’s a nice
person. You meet her mum and you meet her dad, and then they have their troubles, and you walk with them, and you
believe them. And so, by the time when you have giant stone creatures floating around a staircase making tiny
adjustments on enormous aurorae, it’s sort of part of what’s going on. You’re already lost in the forest.
D: I think what I wanted to was to make sure the story was about a real person in a real situation. I could have very
easily done the same story but she really does go into a fantasy realm, and it actually happens, and then when she comes
back, something from that world comes back, too, and all, you know, that kind of thing. At that point, it disconnects for
me from the real interesting part of the story, which is her working out how she feels about things, how she deals with
the world, how she feels about her mum, and then men in her life, and who she is and how old she is. All of that is very
real, and the fact that it’s portrayed in these sort of baroque, imaginative dreamscapes is fun and I love to do that. It
allows you to see the anxiety from a different angle, with fresh eyes. But, at the end of the day, it’s real.
FIN.
-Interview conducted by Gregory Weinkauf, 7 September, 2005, obscenely hot and glaring day in Hollywood, America
Very Special Thanks to L.D., S.Z. & N.G., The Henson Company and of course to Messrs. Dave and Neil.
The men behind MirrorMask
discuss the magic of their method
(and vice-versa)
-- and girls' behaviour.
BY GREGORY WEINKAUF
The door gently but firmly closes, and there within the glass-and-cinderblock room lounge five of us, including two
intriguing men in black as well as Kermit the Frog and The Bear (of the Big Blue House fame). The latter two observe in
glazed silence as director Dave McKean and writer Neil Gaiman warm up to discussing their fantastical new feature,
MirrorMask.
They are brought together beneath the roof of Kermit’s house, The Henson Company in Hollywood -- formerly A&M
Records, and, before that, the workshop of Charlie Chaplin, where he shot portions of The Gold Rush, among other
classics. Now in this esteemed location, one of the world’s top fiction writers and his collaborator, one of the world’s
top graphic designers (turned director), are keen to consider their first foray into feature filmmaking.
Thinking quickly and drawing courage from The Frog, Gregory of ÜberCiné decides to break the ice with a brilliant
question:
Gregory: Have you been in this room before?
Dave McKean: Yes, we keep being shuffled in and out of the rooms.
Neil Gaiman: We move from room to room to room.
D: This is the third time in this room.
N: The one upstairs sort of worked, because we had two of these interviews where you have a bunch of people –
G ("helpfully"): Oh, 'roundtables.'
N: -- and there was one upstairs…roundtables…which worked, just about, but there was one guy who never said
anything.
D: Yeah -- I made him say something.
N: No, I…
D: I said: ‘One more question -- you’re going to ask it.’
G: You extracted…
D (enjoying the memory): ‘You’re just sitting there! You haven’t said anything!’
N: Yeah, unfortunately I realized that we were out of time, so they came in and ended it, and he hadn’t said a word.
G (encouragingly): Right...
N: But then the one downstairs was really odd because it was obvious that the people were all completely different. If
they’re all sort of from the same general background it’s okay – except, you know, you have the two guys from the
comics press on the sofa over there, and the lady here, and the somebody who never said anything there, and the guy
from a website here -- and they all have completely different agendas.
G (wincing at memories of simultaneously-shouted junket questions about Kabbalah bracelets, equestrian safety and
losing post-natal fat): Yeah, it becomes very competitive.
D: In some circumstances.
N (pausing very gently): It wasn’t that sort of nice thing where they’re all asking each other’s questions and everybody’s
happy. It was the…one person’s asking about eggs and the other person’s asking about…Grimm’s fairy tales…
G (presuming the best): So you were playing the diplomat earlier today.
N (amused): I just answer the question that’s asked. What’s fun about this, as I was saying earlier, is the…Normally, by
this point, in a long day of interviews, you are starting to get exhausted, mostly because you had to say the same five
things, over and over again, and somewhere around eleven-thirty you got tired of picking new words and ways to say
them, so now you’re sitting there saying word-for-word the same things…
[Dave is looking suddenly very meditative.]
N (continuing boldly toward the topic of the day): What’s interesting about MirrorMask, today, is that with the exception
of one question -- which is basically, ‘How did the project begin?’ -- everybody wants to know completely different
things. So there’s none of that picking-the-best-wording-of-Answer-B-once-you-hone-it-down-with-an-answer, it’s
more sort of going off in completely different directions. It’s kind of fun. I’m certainly not as wiped as I normally am by
this point.
[Dave remains thoughtful and quiet and carefully observes the turning capstans of my tape-recorder, which I sincerely
hope really are turning…]
G (risking gushing embarrassment as he has numerous times before): Well, I think it’s definitely that sort of project. I
have to confess I’m a bit excited about it because I sincerely believe that you have both created a new genre with this
film. Were you conscious of that initially? I mean, did you have a meeting and say, ‘Let’s start a new genre of feature
film’?
D (proudly yet with substantial mirth): New genre.
N: No, I mean, what was lovely about this was that what we produced was essentially produced from the barriers. You
know, art is normally created trying to get around barriers, when you’re presented with a set of limitations. And the
limitations on this one were really fun and really difficult -- which were: Can we make a family fantasy film which would
have the same kind of effect on somebody watching it as [Henson family classics, both designed by Brian Froud]
Labyrinth or Dark Crystal did -- and can you do it for four million dollars? And with that as a sort of ground rule, we
wound up having to figure out the language of the film, in order to do it at that budget. Scripting it was really weird. We
had to write it together, because I couldn’t just do the thing that I would normally do -- go off and write a script and
then give it to Dave to make into a film or make into art of whatever, because only Dave actually understood what he
was planning to do digitally that would allow him to bring in this animated film for money that would not actually feed a
large Hollywood production.
[Dave continues to eye the hypnotic capstans, but nods in agreement.]
G: You had some experience together, given your short films, and even the opening titles for [BBC miniseries]
Neverwhere. Were those kind of a launching pad for the style you were creating together?
D (enthusiastically): Kind of! About…um…eight years ago? -- I kind of wanted to start playing with moving picture
things -- no real plan -- and then right about 1998 I really wanted to get to grips with film. I’ve always loved film. But I
thought: Nobody’s actually going to knock on my door and say, ‘Do you want to make a film? Here, have a cheque.’ So
I thought I should just get on with it and do it, so I made two short films {elegant festival faves "The Week Before" and
"N[eon]"}, and in making those films for no money at all…
N (cheerfully interjecting): In his mother’s barn.
D (chuckling): Yeah. In the barn, yeah.
G: Wait, please pause for a moment. Literally?
N: Yeah!
D: Yeah, literally.
G: That’s the best.
D: It’s ‘Let’s Put On A Show’ time. Judy Garland. And then I worked with a little team. Through an advertising job I
met a producer. Through him I met a DP, Tony Shearn, and through doing the Neverwhere parts and things like that, I
met a CG supervisor who trained as an artist but shifted into computers, called Max McMullin, and that was my little
team. We made all the short films together, the music videos, etc., with this plan that we’d be working towards making a
feature film. At that point we didn’t know what it would be. I started writing a few scripts, and then the obvious
opportunity came up.
N: What was also funny was that around the point where -- around 1996 was the point where…well, earlier, I mean,
more like 1994-95 -- Dave sort of confessed to me, much as somebody would confess to some kind of inappropriate
personal habit…
[Gregory furtively glances at The Frog, who vibrates slightly but somehow refrains from laughing out loud.]
N (continuing):…that he was actually really was quite serious about wanting to make some films. And I said, ‘Okay,
well, I’ll make it happen.’ And over the years we’d come up with a sort of very loose plan. I seemed to be the one who
was actually out doing Hollywood stuff -- which Dave had no desire of being out here, or playing the game of being out
here -- and I was actually starting to enjoy it a bit, to the point where by 2003 The Hollywood Reporter ran a front-page
story on how I was the author who had the most bought-but-unmade properties.
[Laughter all round.]
G: That’s pretty soon to change, true?
N: Yeah, but it’s already changing. Beowulf [directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Ray Winstone in the lead] starts
shooting in about two weeks, and I think Coraline [based on Gaiman’s young-person’s novella, illustrated, natch, by
McKean] is technically in production [with A Nightmare Before Christmas’ Henry Selick helming], but it’s rather hard to
draw a line with it because it’s stop-motion animation. It’s greenlighted and they’re making models. So there’s two
things.
[Gaiman’s Books of Magic graphic novels -- considered to be more than a little of the inspiration for the Harry Potter
phenomenon -- are also fast forming into a Major Motion Picture.]
G: Dave has gotten his feet wet as a director. Now what’s your next step after [A Short Film About] John Bolton?
[Note for the uninitiated: John Bolton is an illustrator par excellence, and in 2003 Gaiman made…well…a short film about
him.]
N: Well, yes, I got my feet wet with John Bolton. Mostly, the idea with Bolton was: Okay, if I’m going to direct a film --
which I really wanted to do, having had stuff of mine directed by other people -- not Dave, I should say -- the
collaboration with Dave was very different. But the Neverwhere TV series, my Babylon 5 episode, which was directed
by a nice man [Doug Lefler; Dragonheart: A New Beginning] who did it very well. But those people left me -- and the
collaborations I’ve had with other directors as a writer -- have definitely left me going, ‘You know…at least I wouldn’t
screw it up like that.’
G: That’s generous.
N: There are things where you sort of go, ‘I may not be a great artist…’ but Clive Barker -- bless him, I love him -- was
the first person to say to me, he said, ‘You’ll direct.’ And I said, ‘I’m not a director; I have no desire to direct,’ and he
said, ‘Oh, you’ll direct in self-defense.’ And that actually was the point: There are things that I want to do where it will
be a matter of directing in self-defense, because I know how it is in my head. And then with Bolton, I thought, I’d better
find out if I actually enjoy the process, because if I don’t, it’s going to be a year out of my life, and it’s going to be a
really miserable year that I could have spent writing a book or making a comic or writing poetry or playing in the garden
or doing something with the kids. I could have enjoyed myself.
[Gregory references Gaiman’s “demon-tomato” salsa, an anecdote from the author’s web-journal, however even he
cannot now figure out exactly what he muttered to launch this topic.]
N (declamatorily, but with undeniable charm): I made salsa yesterday.
[Dave giggles.]
G: I did my research.
D: There’s a question we haven’t had so far.
G: You may answer it as well.
D: No, no, I haven’t tasted it yet.
N: I promised him a bottle. I made…I’m not sure…at least a tubful. I went out, I picked a bushel of tomatoes, I picked
the peppers, I did the onions, I came back and did the salsa. My hand was still burning this morning. And it should all be
bottled by the time I get home.
G: [mild grunting noise]
N: But, so with Bolton, that really was the idea: Just find out if I enjoy the process. And I actually discovered that
although some of the directing process just seems to be, somebody coming up to you and desperately going, ‘Does this
need to be blue or green?’ when the actual answer is: It doesn’t matter, what would you want? But you’d better say
either ‘blue’ or ‘green’ because otherwise they will think that you have no idea what’s going on.
G (to both): Well, there’s certainly, obviously a great deal of trust in your collaborations.
N (either deeply contemplating this, or humouring The Interviewer, or perhaps both): There is, really.
G: It’s legendary.
D: Is it? [chuckles heartily]
N: It is the nice thing about -- there was that point when we were having our photo taken [The Interviewer, incidentally,
was in the room and was mistaken by the photographer to be Gaiman, which rather made The Interviewer’s otherwise
mad day, in a jolly little way], and the realization that while we’ve been saying, casually, ‘Oh, we’ve been working
together for twenty years,’ actually, when you do the sums, we’ve been working together for twenty years -- which is a
long time. Seriously. And we still enjoy working together.
D: [growl of approval]
G (slyly slipping back to the project at hand): I understand that MirrorMask came about as a result of a story-pitch-
concept [sic] you had going on in the Henson household in England, and then developed into this script…
N: Actually, both of those things happened in the same time period. The simplicity of it was that Lisa Henson [producer;
Jim’s daughter] called us -- called me -- and said, ‘We’re making a family fantasy film, we have four million dollars. Do
you think that Dave McKean…She said, ‘I’ve seen Dave’s short films, I know that they were made with no money,
would he be interested in doing this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I can ask him.’
[The Interviewer realizes that he may have coaxed his subjects into the exact redundant loop that they all joked about not
getting into, back at the top of the conversation -- perhaps even the same genesis narrative found in the introduction to
the MirrorMask illustrated screenplay book he has perused at your finer booksellers about town -- but Gaiman’s on a
roll, and even The Frog and The Bear remain rapt, so we go with the flow.]
N (valiantly soldiering through): She said, ‘If he [McKean] is [interested], we know how much you cost as a scriptwriter
-- we cannot afford you -- but would you maybe come up with the story or something?’ And I said, ‘No, if Dave says
yes, I’m going to be writing this, and you can leave me to deal with my agent and my lawyer.’ And Dave said yes, so I
said yes. And then we sort of bounced a few ideas backwards and forwards, and they were…I had an idea about a girl,
and, sort of, two girls who are one girl, a weird dichotomy. A girl with a traveling theatre group, and Dave had an idea --
had a dream about –
G: [casually interrupts with something incomprehensible, now sounding quite weirdly like, ‘Two knights were Bob-Bob’
-- to be repaired forthwith if ever I discover what the hell I actually said, and why.]
D (amazingly getting this): Yes! I had a dream about the circus and the sick mother and then, just sort of wandering
through the door and very, very gradually walking into this abandoned city -- because I love European cities and just
wandering around places, you know, Venice at three in the morning, things like that. And I love that feeling.
G: This is a bit of a tangent, but in creating a female protagonist, you two are probably among the top men-artists [“men-
artists”?] who consistently create female protagonists that completely engross many, many people. Is this… [to Gaiman]
like, some of your books, Richard Mayhew [Neverwhere] and Shadow [American Gods], they are about heroic men. But
a lot of the time, you do focus on girls and young-woman protagonists. What’s the challenge involved in that?
N: Well, the bit that always fascinates me, honestly, is not -- I figure, you know, women are slightly more than fifty
percent of the human race; it makes sense to write women fifty percent of the time. On the other hand, it puzzles me that
people either cannot write women, do not write women, or, when they do write women, as happens a lot in comics, you
sort of read these characters and go: This is bizarre. You’ve lived on Planet Earth all these years. You must have had a
mother. Can you have gone through your entire life and never have encountered a woman? You write about them as if
they’re these fictional creatures. You know, and they can either be ‘men’ with enormous watermelons strapped to their
chests, or, or…
G: Was that a consideration early on with MirrorMask?
[Neil is busy, but Dave laughs at the absurdity.]
G (clarifying that this was an attempt at levity): No, no…
N (recovering really nicely from the pointless interruption): I think it was a consi…yeah, it was a consider…no, but, I
mean, the-the-the-the the decision to write women went all the way back, I think, to us talking about what we wanted to
do with Black Orchid…[the duo’s impressive, pre-Sandman, three-volume graphic novel outing of which I have three
first printings which were in my bag in that glass and cinderblock room with us but which I decided not to bother them
about signing, owing to the professional nature of our meeting and all].
G (interrupting again, basically throwing bad verbiage after bad): Yeah, that’s what I was actually leaning toward as well.
N: [...what we wanted to do with Black Orchid]…was, was the part, okay, let’s put in: Nobody’s writing female
characters who aren’t highly-trained Ninja assassins or really good with guns, and seeing we know lots of women but
none of them are highly-trained Ninja assassins…
[Dave laughs heartily. What is he not telling us?]
N: Why don’t we write about, just, all of them?’ It was more, sort of, ‘What aren’t people doing? Oh, we can do this,
and this will be fun!’ The joy, for me, of MirrorMask, was the fact that Helena -- the point that I think we knew that we
were doing something right with Helena, was the first time we got feedback on the script from Sony -- and they
grumbled. They’d read the script, and they weren’t quite sure from the script whether or not she was meant to be eleven
years old or eighteen years old, because sometimes she reacted like a kid, and sometimes she reacted as a young woman.
And, it was like, ‘Yes -- you must never have had a daughter.’ That for me is the joy of that age. I mean, how old is…
D: My daughter’s twelve, so she’s just sort of getting close to that now.
N: You must be seeing that at twelve, because I’m seeing that with my daughter -- this sort of weird one-day-she’s-
twenty-two, the-next-day-she’s-six.
D: Yes, definitely. I think also, to be fair, a lot of the character [of Helena] is Stephanie [Leonidas, superb lead actress of
MirrorMask]. You know, when she started actually engrossing herself in the character -- she was nineteen when she did
it, playing younger. A lot of the character became hers as well. And things like, there’s an early scene on the roof, where
she’s told how sick her mother is really and Rob Brydon [who plays her gentle father] is up there on the roof. And we
went through rehearsal and we had a read-through and it seemed to be fine, it seemed to be all good, but when she
actually came to do it, she absolutely broke down into tears and everything. I didn’t expect that at all -- we didn’t know
that was going to happen. And there were hardened gaffers and electricians all sort of wiping their eyes, which was
wonderful. So I think that the feeling that you have for her, and the fact that her anxieties you really connect with -- and
the fact that she believes it all, so you believe everything through her -- to be honest, that’s really down to Stephanie
carrying it off.
N: We were convinced she would be the hardest part to cast. We were actually convinced that Helena was going to be
the part that was going to be the absolute nightmare to cast. And actually, we got her on the first day, thought that it
couldn’t be that easy…and it turned out Valentine [Jason Barry in a fun, energetic turn as Helena’s friend and guide
through her quest] turned out to be the part that was impossible to cast -- which we assumed would be one of the nice,
easy ones.
[The door opens again as Another Figure stealthily enters the room -- neither Man nor Bear nor Frog. She is the kindly
bearer of the Wind-It-Up Gesture. The Interviewer requests One More, and has it granted.]
G: In most of your work together, and separately, there’s a great sort of archetypal storytelling mingled with common,
everyday reality. Where did you pitch MirrorMask, to decide, ‘All right, this is how we’re going to get the audience
involved, and then present them with things that some people may say, Oh, that’s too weird, I don’t even know what
that is -- what was that thing floating around the staircase?’
[Dave laughs knowingly, as only Dave can.]
N: In my experience, one of the lovely ways of, just, storytelling -- which I think we tried to do in MirrorMask, and I try
to do in a lot of things -- is where you more or less do the equivalent of taking somebody by the hand, put your other
hand on their shoulder, gaze deeply into their eyes, and say, ‘Walk with me, I’m going to tell you a story, and
everything’s going to be safe,’ and you walk with them into the forest and you walk with them a step at a time, and by
the time that they realize that you’ve abandoned them there and they’re lost in the forest, it’s too late -- they’re lost. I
think writing like that, that was part of the fun of MirrorMask. You meet Helena and you like her, and she’s a nice
person. You meet her mum and you meet her dad, and then they have their troubles, and you walk with them, and you
believe them. And so, by the time when you have giant stone creatures floating around a staircase making tiny
adjustments on enormous aurorae, it’s sort of part of what’s going on. You’re already lost in the forest.
D: I think what I wanted to was to make sure the story was about a real person in a real situation. I could have very
easily done the same story but she really does go into a fantasy realm, and it actually happens, and then when she comes
back, something from that world comes back, too, and all, you know, that kind of thing. At that point, it disconnects for
me from the real interesting part of the story, which is her working out how she feels about things, how she deals with
the world, how she feels about her mum, and then men in her life, and who she is and how old she is. All of that is very
real, and the fact that it’s portrayed in these sort of baroque, imaginative dreamscapes is fun and I love to do that. It
allows you to see the anxiety from a different angle, with fresh eyes. But, at the end of the day, it’s real.
FIN.
-Interview conducted by Gregory Weinkauf, 7 September, 2005, obscenely hot and glaring day in Hollywood, America
Very Special Thanks to L.D., S.Z. & N.G., The Henson Company and of course to Messrs. Dave and Neil.
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| Screenwriter Neil Gaiman (gazing dreamily) and Director Dave McKean (doing telekinetic trick), contemplate the acquisition of a new chair. Photo © 2005 The Jim Henson Company |
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